A Dirty Job
by Esmerelda
Summary: Dawn cleans out Buffy's room.


TITLE: A Dirty Job  
AUTHOR: Esmerelda  
E-MAIL: animus_liber@hotmail.com  
DISCLAIMER: I'm borrowing.  
TIMELINE: A few weeks after 'The Gift'.  
SPOILERS: 'The Gift'.  
SYNOPSIS: It's time to clean out Buffy's room.  
IMPROV: #17 - ragged, decade, invent, cascade.  
DISTRIBUTION: Ask. I'll say yes.  
AUTHOR'S NOTES: This was going to be a semi-cheerful 'let's celebrate Buffy's life!' fic and then... well. The best laid plans and all that.  
FEEDBACK: It's the fic equivalent of money.  
RATING: PG  
  
  
  
  
Dawn is the sole remaining Key to a dead family and an empty house.  
  
They've all gone, left the rooms full of belongings and emoty of life. Joyce. Buffy. Dawn herself, when the courts decide what's going to happen to her.  
  
She's just been floating, so far, from Giles' to Willow's to Xander's to her dad's hotel. Giles doesn't really want to take responsibility for the sister of his responsibility, she knows, but he's dutifully applied for custody because for Dawn to stay in Sunnydale is what Buffy would have wanted. Her father is contesting, of course. Dawn doesn't really care which one she ends up with. It can't be reality, because she's not real. Buffy can't be dead for her, because she's not real.  
  
She stays at home some nights, tells whoever she's supposed to be with she's with one of the others. She suspects that they check, they know, but they've never called her on it. She assumes they think they understand.  
  
Those are the nights she goes timidly upstairs, bypasses her room and her mother's old room and pauses on the threshold of Buffy's room as if she's expecting to be thrown back, like by a vampire barrier. She never is, of course, just feels that she should be. It feels like sacrilege, to invade Buffy's room where she was rarely allowed when Buffy was alive (until they Found Out and Buffy decided she was going to protect Dawn with her life). She goes in anyway and lies on Buffy's bed, a small bundle in the covers that still smell slightly of her sister, because she hasn't washed them yet (nobody ever told her how to work the machine). She cuddles Mr Gordo and gradually her breath becomes ragged as the tears hitch in her throat and before she knows there's a cascade of salty sobs wetting the soft pillows.  
  
Dawn never realised it was possible to cry so much. Not even when Joyce died... but then she'd still had Buffy.  
  
Now she's alone. There's no one to cry on. No one to cry with.  
  
She feels they blame her. Giles saw her, right after, and though he hid it immediately she saw the resentment burning in his gaze. Willow and Xander look after her but their eyes are glazed, thinking of Buffy while they hug her sister. Tara and Anya's smiles are genuine, but they barely know her, hardly knew her sister, and Dawn isn't interested in their care, doesn't want their sympathy.  
  
Spike follows her, silently looking out for her the way Buffy must have told him too, but he doesn't look at her.  
  
She hasn't met anyone's eyes in weeks.  
  
The last were Angel's, when he came and saw and went. She saw enough agony in that deep chocolate gaze to keep her looking at her feet for decades.  
  
Those two, the ones Buffy should have killed but let live, are the only ones she gives up Buffy's room for. Sometimes she'll come upstairs and the door will be closed, and she knows that one of them has climbed easily through the window - the way Angel, at least, has so many times before - and are sitting as if Buffy will follow, home from patrol, any moment.  
  
Dawn went in once, to Angel, thinking that if anyone could understand it would be him; he'd cried and she'd cried and he'd embraced her gently, but she hadn't found the surcease there she'd hoped. Angel is too busy with his own pain to reach out and soothe hers. They all are, because after all, she hadn't known Buffy as long as they had, fake (perfectly vivid, devastatingly accurate, crippingly emotional) memories aside.  
  
She hates to take away whatever comfort Angel and Spike (and herself) find in that small room that feels bigger because Buffy stamped her vibrancy into it (which Dawn's green energy is slowly suffocating), but she remembers how a load - a small load, but appreciable - seemed to lighten when she and Buffy cleared out her mother's room. Of course there'd been tears and sadness, but there'd also been remembering things they'd forgotten (or Buffy had forgotten and Dawn had remembered forgetting), good things that made them give each other soggy, affectionate smiles, and then when they'd finished there'd been a sense of freedom; Joyce's freedom, her own freedom, and Dawn dearly needs that, though this one she'll be doing alone.  
  
She's been thinking about doing it for a while, but invented excuses for herself: it's late, I'm tired, I don't have boxes, I don't want to let her go.  
  
But Dawn needs to let her go, because she's afraid that otherwise she'll drown in her. Buffy gave herself up for Dawn, so Dawn must give up herself for Buffy; remember her every minute, apologise for being the sister that survived, be as much Buffy as she can.  
  
She's taken to carrying around a stake, even though she barely knows what to do with it. It makes her feel better, because there's no Slayer now - she's taken away the Slayer not in prison - and so there has to be a replacement, so Dawn tries, without the power or the knowledge or anything but a vague feeling that she has to balance things up. It has to be her, because she has Summers blood, Buffy's blood.  
  
She's denying it to herself and she hasn't dared even hint at it to anyone else, but she's a little bitter about the blood. It was her blood, her sacrifice to make, her place... her gift. And Buffy took it and left her with words to echo around in her head and an empty house and a directionless life.  
  
Buffy told her the hardest thing in the world is to live in it. Dawn's finding out and sometimes she thinks it's not just hard... it's impossible. If Buffy couldn't do it, strong Buffy with the purpose and the passion and the love - how is Dawn supposed to survive? Why is she supposed to want to?  
  
She lingers at the doorway of Buffy's room. She's usually eager to go in, immerse herself in her sister's essence, but this is different. She's going in there to dilute that essence, rip it clean away to leave a clean room, one she'll be able to enter without hearing Buffy talking to her or Willow crying or Spike's heartbreaking howls.  
  
She starts with the bed. Strips it, emotionless apart from the tears that soon blur her vision, and throws the linen out into the hall to be laundered. Then she opens the closet, pulls open the drawers and does the same with the clothes hanging neatly within or folded small. There's no order to them, but somehow Dawn knows Buffy could find all her clothes exactly as she wanted them. Not any more; she rips them ferociously from their hangers and tosses them outside to the growing laundry pile. Occasionally she'll pause, press one of Buffy's favourite pieces to her heart, feel the walls come up around it as she tosses the article away without a second glance.  
  
Soon all the clothes are done with, the pretty, feminine clothes that were so much at odds with Buffy's toughness and the darker (leatherer) items she wore more and more often before her death. Dawn doesn't know what she'll do with them. She supposes she should take them to a charity shop or something, let Buffy keep helping the world even while she's dead (to the world, for the world) and rotting in her grave. More likely she'll burn them.  
  
She'll have to let the Scoobies have a go at them, she realises. She won't keep any of them; remember some of them, buy similar, but she won't wear Buffy's clothes. Willow might; Anya, possibly. Or they'll just want them as mementoes, Giles a particular top she always wore for training or Xander an outfit he admired her in. There were a lot of those; Dawn remembers from when they dressed Buffy for the quiet funeral. A dress, they'd chosen. A girly, short pink dress and a scarf that had been their mother's and Dawn's favourite necklace and the leather jacket she used to wear all the time, the one she never admitted Angel had given to her.  
  
She'll have to let the Scoobies have a go at everything. She expects they'll take most of it, when she makes it clear she's not keeping any, pack it lovingly away and cast worried, appalled glances her way. Are you sure you're ready, Dawn? Dawnie, I know you think you don't want anything now, but maybe you should keep something for if...  
  
If what? she says out loud, ignoring the fact that she's replying only to herself. For if she forgets? If only; she never can, never will, and nothing she can touch would help anyway. For if Buffy comes back?  
  
The tears that have collected spill down Dawn's cheeks and reflexively she reaches for a tissue. It's a familiar action. She wishes she were cried out: it doesn't make her feel better, only weaker. The night after the morning, when Tara's hurriedly-created herbal sedative had worn off, Spike had followed Dawn for the first time: but when she began to collect what she needed for this resurrection ritual, he'd stopped her, told her fiercely he knew, oh he knew, but he wouldn't let her do that to Buffy, bring something back that wasn't Buffy, and she'd thought he was going to hit her at one point. That hadn't stopped her, but his tears had. She didn't think she would have gone through with it anyway. What would she say to her?  
  
She's resigned herself, instead, to life without Buffy. It's amazing how quickly she got used to it. Things fall into routine. And if it feels like a routine that was dreamed up by the masters of hell, Dawn can train herself to live with it.  
  
She cleaned out the rest of the closet and bureau then; hats, shoes (Buffy couldn't keep a pair of shoes together), bits of jewellery which Dawn has to harden herself not to hang onto, makeup. She flings it all onto the floor and moves on, heedless of what she's crunching beneath her small feet.  
  
The pictures of herself, Joyce, she and Buffy and Joyce, the gang, she drops onto the bed, abandoning them. Probably somebody will want them, she doesn't. She's not so careful with the other pictures, the posters from the wall, the butterflies Buffy hung above her bed, the calendar with her sister's scrawl. She does stop to see what's on it. Buffy had things planned through September.  
  
Dawn stops for a moment to look around the room at what she hasn't cleaned yet. Her long, unkempt fingernails scratch absently, nervously at the walls and a piece of wallpaper comes loose. She stares at it for a moment. She never liked Buffy's wallpaper, or rather she loved Buffy's wallpaper and didn't like her own, so she rips it off in a long strip, delighting in the satisfying sound it makes as it separates from the wall, exposing the uneven, glaring white plaster.  
  
Wiped clean, laid bare, ready to be remade.  
  
She drops the paper on the floor as she tears it off violently, disregarding the trinkets she is covering, the mess she is making. She won't have to tidy it up, because there's no one with authority over her anymore. No more family. Her father isn't family: literally. They've only really met a handful of times.  
  
The next thing is Buffy's bedside table, and Dawn is more reverent with this because Buffy was a girl who kept her treasures close. There are painkillers, a half-empty bottle, and Dawn holds it up, shakes it and has idle thoughts about it before disregarding the little brown vessel. A couple of shells. A book. A ring.  
  
And in the second drawer, a pile of books, and Dawn lifts them out and sits down on the bed with them, because if she's honest this is (one of the things) that she was looking for. Dawn herself kept a journal because of her mother's encouragement, and she's always suspected Buffy did the same.  
  
Now she knows.  
  
She opens the first one and freezes, feeling the little sister, as if Buffy's enraged ghost will drop down to avenge the invasion of her privacy. Idiocy; Dawn doesn't believe in ghosts. Anyway, who would hang around here, around her?  
  
She looks down and skims the page. It's boring. Details of her patrol that night, the two fledglings she'd killed, the fight, the weapons, and Dawn is surprised at how dreary her sister is, until it occurs to her that the hand is as loopy and carefree as it hasn't been for a long while. She checks the date and it's three years ago: this is a notebook meant for Giles, for the Watcher's Council, for generations of Slayers after her.  
  
No wonder they die so soon, she thinks, if this is all that is offered to them: dull accounts with no life, no hope. No mention of Buffy's friends or family, the things that she knows Spike thinks kept her alive so long. And that wasn't very long.  
  
Buffy always knew her life would be cut short. She probably thought someone else would do the cutting.  
  
But anyway that doesn't interest her right now, so she sets it aside to give to Giles later (to read through a haze of alcohol) and puts with it all the similar exercise books, plain and functional and stopping a couple of years ago, and she moves onto the patterned notebooks, the brightly coloured pads, and thinks she should have known which ones would contain Buffy.  
  
She finds the earliest one there, from when they moved to Sunnydale, and wonders what happened to the others: the first page gives her the answer. Buffy had burned them in a fire of anger that she was being made to leave by her parents and forced out by her Calling, and Dawn thinks how she did something similar to her books, the difference being Buffy's were written by hand and Dawn' by magick and monks.  
  
Dawn reads the first few pages and then stops. She suddenly misses her sister with a ferocity that leaves her nauseous, like she hasn't let herself since the very first days, and it's dangerous. This is dangerous, to her.  
  
Buffy is gone. Reading her diaries will not bring her closer. Nothing will bring her back.  
  
Dawn rises, leaving the diaries - she'll give them to Willow, or maybe to Angel - and crosses the room slowly and purposefully to the last item which is Buffy, which is of Buffy.  
  
The thing she's left to last is Buffy's chest. It's a family heirloom, ugly really, but precious to generations of Dawn's ancestors (not to her, nothing is left that will be precious to her). Even when Joyce knew about the Slaying, and stakes and knuckle-dusters littered Buffy's bureau next to the makeup, it remained Buffy's place for her best weapons and Dawn has never been allowed to touch it.  
  
Buffy's not in a position to disallow anything now and Dawn opens the chest slowly, almost reverently, discarding the top layer. She'll explore it later, but for now her fingers are itching to feel cool worked metal and smooth wooden stakes.  
  
She stares into the chest. There's a sword there, a stake, a couple of crosses, a fancy holy water bottle, and some stuff Dawn doesn't recognise.  
  
She lifts it all out; she'll learn. A cross goes around her neck, another in her pocket; a stake in the back of her jeans, and one in her hand. She heads for the window, scrambles out and makes a note to practice that. Probably one the boys will come around tonight, wonder at the mess, add to it if it's Spike. Then they'll wait, and she'll come back from patrol. Maybe.  
  
Buffy took the death that should have been Dawn's. Dawn is planning to return the favour. 


End file.
